“Forget something?”
Tess stopped two handholds down, one boot braced against a crystal rib, and looked up. Asha crouched at the edge of the hole with a filter mask dangling from two fingers.
Right. The Aether density that had put her on her back ten seconds ago.
“Thanks.” She climbed back up and took the mask, pressing it over her nose and mouth and cinching the straps behind her head. The seal dug into the same spot on her cheekbone.
Asha checked the fit with two quick tugs, fingers testing the seal against Tess’s jaw the way she checked wound dressings. “How’s your head?”
“Fine. I just… after watching everyone fight to protect me, it’s my turn.”
“I know.” Asha let go and leaned back on her heels. “Slow down. Nothing good comes from rushing the big stuff.”
Tess nodded and lowered herself back into the hole.
The climb down was six meters of raw crystal, and every handhold took her further from the room above and closer to something that had nothing in common with Floor 2’s corridors. The crystal here was a raw skeleton where panels and fabricated walls should have been, all organic curves and exposed ribs. It looked like the inside of something that had been alive for a very long time. Crystal ribs arched around her like the vaulting of a cathedral grown rather than built. The air thickened with each handhold.
She dropped the last meter onto a floor that curved beneath her boots like the bottom of a bowl.
The substructure opened around her in amber light. Roughly oval, maybe fifteen meters across, high enough to stand with room to spare. Crystal growths rose from the floor and descended from the ceiling in formations that looked less like stalactites and more like the roots of something enormous growing above. The light pulsed through them in deep, slow rhythms she could feel in her teeth.
And in the center, mounted on a platform of dense crystal that branched from the floor like a root system, FCN-2B sat waiting.
Massive was the right word. FCN-2A had been a workstation with four crystal housings and a console she could reach across. This was a monument. Six full-sized skill crystals studded the housing in a ring, each one the size of her forearm, seated in dark mounts. The console was a semicircular array of mechanical switches, analog dials, and interface pads, all coated in mineral dust and connected by cable runs that disappeared into the platform’s base.
Tess pulled her toolkit from her belt, spread it open on the platform, and stepped back. The tools looked small against the FCN’s housing.
“Bee. I’m down.”
BEE: I know. The sensor data from FCN-2A is registering a secondary system in proximity for the first time in decades. There is a connection handshake trying to establish, but FCN-2B is not responding.
“Let’s find out why.”
She placed her hand on the nearest crystal housing and activated [ANALYZE].
Data flooded across her vision in a rush, stacking faster than FCN-2A’s had. Six crystals instead of four, each one larger, and carrying a dense instruction set. She could process most of it in real time, but the volume kept building:
·········································FCN-2B STATUS REPORTOverall Status: Offline (Critical)·········································Crystal A — Spawn CoordinationStatus: Corrupted — 8% FunctionalityIssue: Non-standard routing detectedCrystal B — Floor ReconfigurationStatus: Active (Anomalous) — 3% FunctionalityIssue: Runaway process detectedCrystal C — Structural IntegrityStatus: Locked — 0% FunctionalityIssue: Encrypted access layerCrystal D — Power DistributionStatus: Unstable — 12% FunctionalityIssue: Cascade trigger detectedCrystal E — Environmental ControlStatus: Degraded — 22% FunctionalityIssue: Corrosion, physical damageCrystal F — Integration CoreStatus: Offline — 0% FunctionalityIssue: No upstream signal·········································Connected Systems:FCN-2A (SENSORS) ………….. DISCONNECTEDFloor 2 Infrastructure …. OFFLINE·········································
She read the readout, then read it again.
Five crystals showed issues or instability. One, Environmental Control, showed normal physical decay. And Crystal B, Floor Reconfiguration, was active and running at 3%.
Tess crouched beside Crystal B and ran [ANALYZE] directly on its housing. The focused scan went deeper, peeling apart the crystal’s instruction set layer by layer.
The physical structure was practically perfect. That was the first wrong thing. Twenty-plus years sealed down here should have produced the same corrosion and mineral dust she’d cleaned from FCN-2A’s crystals. Instead, Crystal B’s substrate was clean. The instruction channels were clear, but they were doing something completely wrong.
[ANALYZE] rendered it in successive layers: a growth function embedded in the reconfiguration architecture. The crystal was telling the floor to expand. Past any reset, past any boundary. Just… Grow. As if she had put the skill into the crystal with her [INTERFACE]. It was out of place, demanding new corridors, new rooms, new structural branches. Boundary parameters stripped, reset triggers absent, termination condition: none.
“You see that, Bee? Crystal B has a runaway growth skill loaded into it. The floor reconfiguration system is telling everything out there to just… keep building.”
BEE: That would explain the overgrowth and dead zones. The outer sections are not failing because of insufficient Aether. They are failing because the floor was ordered to grow beyond what the Aether could sustain.
“The floor is eating itself.” Tess moved to Crystal A. Same intact substrate beneath the mineral dust, same functional channels. Inside, routing tables were rewritten to feed data in loops, spawn coordination instructions pointing at addresses that didn’t exist, reference calls that circled back to Crystal C and hit a wall of encryption. “And Crystal A’s been rewritten. The routing is all wrong. Loops, dead references, instructions that point nowhere.”
BEE: Crystal B’s growth directive is not a malfunction. Growth functions do not write themselves. That instruction was loaded deliberately.
“Yeah.” Tess checked Crystal C. Encrypted, pristine underneath, locked. An untouched encryption layer sat over the functional crystal like a padlock on a door. “And C is sealed behind encryption. Deliberately. Someone put this here… But… how?”
Crystal D held a cascade trigger function wired into the power distribution instructions, connected to every other crystal in the node. If she modified D’s parameters without a specific upstream signal, the trigger would fire and propagate failures across the entire system like a tripwire.
Crystal F was dead, simply starved. It needed stable signals from the other five crystals to boot, and with four of them compromised, it had nothing to work with.
Tess sat back on her heels and looked at the ring of dark crystals in the amber light.
Five crystals systematically compromised, and one left to rot naturally. Some kind of growth virus ran at the center, consuming the floor from the inside out while everything else was rigged to make sure nobody could stop it.
“Someone did this. They infected the reconfiguration crystal, then set up the other four to protect the process.”
BEE: The sabotage predates my activation. This was done before CORE-A’s copy was transferred to me. Someone accessed this node and deliberately crippled Floor 2’s ability to function. Then sealed the sub-structure behind them.
“And from the surface, it would look like the floor was just decaying on its own.”
BEE: The Network would have assessed a dying dungeon and moved on. They would never have known the cause was deliberate.
Tess pressed her palms against her knees. “Was it the Network? Or someone else?”
Bee didn’t answer. Neither of them had an answer yet.
She started with Crystal E.
The only crystal showing honest damage. Corrosion on the contact points, mineral dust in the housing, with three cracked pathways from decades of moisture exposure. The same work she’d done on FCN-2A, and her hands fell into the rhythm without thinking. Solvent on the corrosion, brush on the contacts, probe into each pathway to test continuity. Two of the cracked pathways were salvageable. She bypassed the dead one with a jumper filament soldered at the torch’s finest setting, tested it, adjusted the angle, tested again.
It was easy physical work, zero AP. Her hands knew the work while the rest of her mind turned the bigger problem over.
Crystal E climbed to 48% on physical repairs alone. Environmental Control covered temperature regulation, atmospheric monitoring, and ambient Aether density. Not the most critical system in the node, but it was clean—free of bad instructions, locks, and traps.
“Hey!” she called up toward the hole. “How’s it look up there?”
Petra’s voice drifted down, distant but clear: “Quiet. Yuki says movement in the corridors but nothing’s approaching. Guess they didn’t like the drill?”
“Twenty minutes. Maybe less.”
“We’re here.”
Tess turned back to the console and placed her palm flat on the pad.
·········································INTERFACE — ActiveConnected: FCN-2B (Floor Control Node — Structure)AP: 7/9Tech Level: 9Access: Root·········································
Her AP still hadn’t fully regenerated on the surface, but she’d already seen it tick up from 6 to 7 while they were down here.
FCN-2B’s architecture unfolded across her awareness in layers that made FCN-2A look like a junction box: six crystal housings, each one an intricate web of instructions and routing pathways, all interconnected through the console’s central substrate.
The sabotage read as architecture. The compromised crystals were completely fine. Clean skills with precise routing, built to do exactly one thing: prevent anyone from repairing the node.
And whoever had written it had left notes.
The first appeared in Crystal A’s routing tables, embedded in a rerouted data feed like a comment scrawled in the margin of a wiring diagram—text that didn’t belong in a skill crystal’s architecture:
// rerouted. I’m awesome
Tess stared at it. In her admittedly short time working with dungeon systems, she had never seen text commentary inside a crystal’s architecture.
And today, she’d seen two.
BEE: I see it through your interface connection.
She was already moving deeper into Crystal B, tracing the growth directive to its source. The instructions sat three layers down, wrapped in the skill’s core functions like a parasite wired into a nervous system. At its root, another annotation:
// lol wrekt this one
In Crystal D’s tripwire logic:
// touch this and everything goes boom. Have fun :)
And then in Crystal C’s skills, stamped across the access barrier:
// GG NO RE// - pwnd_lol_1 wuz here
Tess drew a breath in through her teeth.
“Bee.”
BEE: I see it. It’s the term from the Tertian Spawner Facility.
“And the ‘GG NO RE.’ Same as the panel.”
BEE: Whoever this is, they had root-level access to dungeon systems that should have been unreachable.
“How? And when?”
BEE: I do not know. But the scope is significant. The spawner facility, the tunnel access infrastructure, and now the floor control node itself. This was not a single act of vandalism. Someone moved through this dungeon’s deepest systems and sabotaged them methodically.
Tess looked at the ring of crystals. Every critical system on Floor 2 was rigged to fail, and a signature was left behind as if the saboteur wanted someone to find it eventually.
She filed it. The questions about who and why would have to wait. The crystals couldn’t.
“OK.” She studied the dependency map rendered across her vision. The sabotage was a loop, not random damage. Crystal A’s routing tables needed validation data from Crystal C. Crystal C was encrypted, inaccessible without a decryption key. Crystal D’s power distribution had a cascade trigger that would fire if changed without Crystal A providing stable data first. Crystal F, the Integration Core, needed upstream signals from all five others to boot. And the decryption key for Crystal C was buried somewhere in Crystal B, which was the one doing all the work on the dungeon itself.
A circular dependency, each crystal guarding the next in a closed chain designed to be unbreakable.
She’d seen this before. Not in a dungeon. In a water recycler in Sector 6, three years ago. Two pumps that wouldn’t start because each one needed the other’s output pressure to initialize. A textbook dependency lock. The fix was always the same: find the component that isn’t part of the loop and use it to break in.
Crystal E wasn’t part of the loop.
The saboteur hadn’t touched Environmental Control. Maybe it wasn’t critical enough to bother rigging, or maybe they hadn’t cared whether the floor could maintain its atmosphere while it consumed itself. Either way, Crystal E was untouched, sitting at 48% on physical repairs, and it had sensor data feeds that overlapped with Crystal A’s validation requirements: environmental telemetry, Aether density readings, ambient temperature mapping. Different data, but the routing format was compatible.
“Bee, Crystal A’s validation check is looking for a steady upstream signal to confirm it’s cleared to operate. It’s designed to receive that from Crystal C, which is encrypted. But if I route Crystal E’s environmental data through A’s validation input, will the check accept it?”
BEE: The validation is checking for signal presence, not signal content. The saboteur built the dependency against Crystal C’s output specifically. They did not account for Crystal E because it was not part of the loop.
“They left a gap.”
BEE: A small one.
“Small’s all I need.”
Tess reached into Crystal E through [INTERFACE] and rerouted a copy of its environmental sensor feed into Crystal A’s validation input. One AP for a patch, not a permanent fix. The kind of workaround she’d have done at level 3 with three AP and shaking hands.
AP: 6/9.
Crystal A flickered briefly. [ANALYZE] caught the shift:
·········································Crystal A — Spawn CoordinationStatus: Partial — 34% FunctionalitySignal Source: Crystal E (Environmental)WARNING: Signal type mismatch — accepted·········································
Partial authorization at best, and the wrong data type entirely. But enough for its output to feed downstream.
“A is partially online. Moving to D.”
Crystal D’s cascade trigger was still live. The tripwire logic sat in the power distribution crystal like a charge wired to a door. Modify the parameters without Crystal A providing steady spawn data, and the trigger fires across every crystal in the node. What it did? Tess didn’t want to find out.
But Crystal A was broadcasting now. Partial signal, borrowed from E, held together with a routing hack. The question was whether the trigger would accept it.
BEE: The trigger references Crystal A’s output. It checks for signal presence, not quality. A is broadcasting. The trigger should not fire.
“Should.”
BEE: High confidence. Our saboteur designed the trigger against a completely offline Crystal A. Partial operation through a non-standard source was clearly not part of their design.
Tess placed her hands on Crystal D’s housing and reached in through [INTERFACE].
The tripwire logic was thick. She could see it as a web of filaments surrounding the power distribution instructions, each thread wired to a failure sequence. If she tripped one, every crystal in the node would reset, and she’d be starting from scratch with less AP.
She worked around the web. Crystal A’s borrowed signal held the trigger dormant while she modified the power distribution parameters through the gaps, rerouting output through open channels and isolating the trap logic from the active instruction set. She didn’t try to remove the trigger—didn’t have the AP to waste on something irrelevant once the node was running. She built around it.
One AP, and Crystal D climbed to 58%.
AP: 5/9.
Power flowed. Crystal F, the Integration Core, received its first stable upstream signal in decades and initialized. No AP required—the master coordinator booted when conditions were met, and D’s power plus A’s partial spawn data were close enough. F came online at 43%, pulling the active crystals into coordinated operation.
“F is up. Going after B.”
BEE: The growth directive in Crystal B is deeply embedded. Removing it will require a full extraction of the reconfiguration architecture, separation of the bad code, and re-embedding the original functions.
“I know. Two AP.” She had five remaining and two crystals still to fix after B, tight but workable. “And the decryption key for C is buried in the growth code. Can’t unlock C without pulling B apart first.”
BEE: The saboteur used B as the keystone. Everything routes through it.
Tess reached into Crystal B and began the extraction.
The growth directive resisted with the passive stubbornness of code that had been running for twenty-plus years and fused into its host crystal like roots through stone.
// lol wrekt this one
Yeah. They sure had.
The extraction was the longest she’d done, larger than anything in FCN-2A. The virus was woven through at every level, and she had to preserve the original reconfiguration functions while cutting the parasitic code away. Her hands stayed flat on the crystal housing, the interface connection steady, [INTERFACE] rendering the work as light and architecture she manipulated with her awareness. She found the boundaries between the skills, traced each one, isolated the growth directives, and mentally selected extract.
Two AP. The growth directive came free in a rush of corrupted data that dissolved as it left the crystal.
·········································EXTRACTION COMPLETESkill Extracted: Floor ReconfigurationAP: 3/9 (2 consumed)Interface Storage: 1/3·········································
She re-embedded the reconfiguration functions into Crystal B. One AP.
·········································EMBED COMPLETESkill: Floor Reconfiguration → Crystal BAP: 2/9 (1 consumed)Interface Storage: 0/3·········································
The substrate lit up as Floor 2’s reconfiguration functions came online for the first time in twenty years. The endless growth directive was gone.
And there, in the skill she’d stripped, was the decryption key for Crystal C:
a7f2c91d-4e8b-11e3…
An impossibly long string of text, hidden inside the growth virus, to ensure anyone who wanted to reach C had to go through B first.
She unlocked Crystal C and brought structural integrity online. One AP. The architecture underneath the encryption was intact, as if the saboteur had wanted to protect the crystal from natural decay while making sure nobody could use it.
AP: 1/9
All six crystals were functional. Crystal F’s Integration Core pulled them together, coordinating data flows and balancing outputs across the node. The numbers were rough. Spawn Coordination 34%, Reconfiguration 71%, Structural Integrity 62%, Power Distribution 58%, Environmental Control 48%, Integration 67%. Not as clean as FCN-2A. But FCN-2A hadn’t been sabotaged.
Tess released [INTERFACE] and leaned back against the console housing. One AP left. Her hands ached from holding the connection, and her neck was stiff from crouching over the crystals. And the damn mask pressed into her cheekbone.
She pulled herself up and keyed in the calibration offsets through the console’s analog controls. Voltage thresholds for the repaired power pathways, signal routing for the partially online crystals, integration parameters for the FCN-2A handshake—all mechanical switches and physical dials.
“Bee. Ready?”
BEE: I have been ready for a very long time.
Tess toggled the restart sequence.
FCN-2B woke with a sound that rose through the floor and into her bones, deeper than FCN-2A’s contained startup whir, a resonant hum that vibrated through the crystal ribs of the sub-structure, through the platform, through six meters of solid floor into the room above. The dark crystals in the console housing pulsed once, amber light flooding their substrates in sequence around the ring. Dim, then steady, then bright.
The console display filled with data. [ANALYZE] caught the flood:
·········································FCN-2B STATUS REPORTOverall Status: Operational (Degraded)·········································Floor 2 Control CoverageSpawn Coordination ……… 34% OnlineFloor Reconfiguration …… 71% OnlineStructural Integrity ……. 62% OnlinePower Distribution ……… 58% OnlineEnvironmental Control …… 48% OnlineIntegration ……………. 67% Online·········································Connected Systems:FCN-2A (SENSORS) ………….. CONNECTEDFloor 2 Infrastructure …. INITIALIZING·········································
“It’s online.”
BEE: Tess.
The text appeared in her vision and stayed.
BEE: I can feel it. All of it. Spawn coordination, structural management, reconfiguration, power routing. Floor 2 is responding to me.
A second line followed.
BEE: The growth directive has stopped. Structural degradation in the outer sections will stabilize as the reconfiguration system resets to normal parameters. It will take time, but the floor has stopped trying to consume itself.
Tess leaned her head back against the housing and closed her eyes behind the mask. One AP, six crystals. A saboteur’s puzzle broken with a routing hack and brute-force extraction. Not pretty, but the node was running, and the floor was going to live.
She opened her eyes and began gathering her tools.
Then the notification hit.
·········································LEVEL UP!Level 9 → Level 10·········································
It bloomed across her vision in the same familiar format she’d seen at every level before. She’d been expecting it. Ninety-one percent before the repair, and the FCN work had pushed her over.
It didn’t dismiss.
The familiar text shattered into streaming lines of code that filled her vision edge to edge. Something foreign to [ANALYZE] data or skill readouts, beyond anything she’d seen in twenty months of interfacing with dungeon systems. Raw architecture, structural code—the framework on which classes were built, rendered in a torrent of symbols and parameters scrolling faster than she could track.
Tess’s hand went out and caught the console housing. Her tools hit the platform and scattered.
·········································CLASS EVOLUTION INITIATEDSearching evolution template…Searching…·········································
The code kept coming. Layering, stacking, heavy, and speeding up. It built behind her eyes, a pressure beyond pain, beyond anything she had a name for—something reaching into her class architecture and finding nothing to hold on to.
·········································EVOLUTION TEMPLATE: NOT FOUNDClass architecture: {null}No registered templateSearching…Searching…ERROR: NULL POINTER — NO EVOLUTION TARGET FOUND·········································
Her knees buckled. She caught herself against the crystal wall near the drill hole and slid down until she was sitting on the curved floor of the sub-structure. The streaming code filled everything. Her interface was locked, every skill frozen, her awareness flooded with architecture beyond her ability to parse or dismiss, or stop.
[AUXILIARY_LINK] activated without her triggering it.
The connection to Bee blazed open on its own, drawing her last AP, the bridge between Tess and the dungeon’s core surging to life like a circuit slamming shut. Bee’s presence flooded through the link, vast and immediate, and the code in her vision doubled as the dungeon’s own architecture merged with the torrent already drowning her.
·········································[AUXILIARY_LINK] — ACTIVE (Involuntary)AP: 0/9WARNING: NO CLASS ARCHITECTURE FOUNDWARNING: EVOLUTION TEMPLATE UNDEFINEDWARNING: ROOT ACCESS DETECTED — MANUAL OVERRIDE AVAILABLE·········································
Above her, muffled through six meters of floor, Petra’s voice calling her name.
Tess couldn’t answer. The code was still coming, and it was looking for something that wasn’t there.